Making fun with prophet’s personality quirks is one thing. Making fun of their holy calling is another entirely. Making fun with cultural things — like green jello — is okay. Making fun of sacred things — like garments — is not. That’s about how I draw my line and I don’t like mean-spirited jokes. The baptized puppy joke is iffy to me. It is amusing but I don’t think Catholics would think so. In cases like that, I try to wonder if the people portrayed in the joke would find it amusing. If I don’t think they would, then I try to avoid it. On the other hand, I love the “Hello, Father” joke because it’s a play on words and involves only one priest’s bias; it doesn’t say anything against the Catholic church itself, like the “now their eyes are open!” line in the baptized puppy joke does.

Two missionaries came across a catholic priest.
Priest: “Hello sons of Satan.”
Missionaries: “Hello Father.

This one is often attributed to J. Golden Kimball, and there is apparently some reason to assume it actually is one of his. The version told about him has a minister of the Church of Christ who says “Good morning, you sons of the Devil!” The response was a tip of the hat with “and a good morning to you father.” There is actually a long tradition of quick pithy comebacks that turn the original statement on its head. In Ireland they are called “pants.” When I shared this story with Henry Glassie, a noted folklorist, he said it had all the elements of a good pant and his Irish friends would have approved.

There are a number of theories about humor, and Glenn has done a good job of picking examples that highlight a number of them.

Daughter of Eve, I have heard some jokes that involve garments at critical points, not as an object of mockery, but rather as part of a humorous story (one of them involving garden sprinklers late at night had the punchline, “oh, did I mention that I was wearing only my garments?”). Would something like that bother you? I’m curious, as for some people any reference to garments in a context like that would be problematic, so it is a border case of humor.

One thing we find is that there is tremendous variability in what people think is funny and what they find offensive, and to some extent it depends on who is saying it. Over time I’ve found that some things I would have found terribly funny as a youth now are offensive to me, while things that would have offended me then strike me as terribly funny now.

However, DoE, I think you hit on a very important point, which is what is sometimes termed the principle of charity. Your humor should be something that anyone involved can laugh at, and should be something that someone can recognize themselves in. When carried out in this way humor can have a didactic value because it gets people to step outside their normal ways of thinking and see themselves in a new light.

I went to a Faith and Fiction summer institute a few summers ago at St. John’s in Queens, NY — it was sponsored by Notre Dame and I was the lone “non-Member” of the group (about 30 people, all with at least some catholic background). I shared the first draft of my dissertation proposal (Mormon Humor) which included the puppy joke (and several other related jokes). They weren’t offended. They laughed. But they were laughing because of how typically Mormon it was — “of course it lifts Mormonism to a superior position, what do you expect?” That was their response.

Fenevad — the kind of garment joke you mentioned wouldn’t bother me, I don’t think. I think it’s for a couple of reasons. 1) It uses “I.” It’s the old in-group, out-group thing. 2) It seems to use a normal life experience — you could replace “garments” with “underwear” and the joke would be essentially the same. It doesn’t make fun of the garments themselves.

The Pope’s secretary walks into the Pope’s office and says “Your Holiness, the Lord Jesus Christ is on the phone. He says He has some good news and some bad news.”

The Pope says, “Well, what’s the good news?”

The secretary says, “Well, He’s come again. There will be no more war or poverty, and everyone will live in peace and love forever.”

The Pope says, “That certainly is good news. But what’s the bad news?”

The secretary says, “He’s calling from Salt Lake City.”

The audience got the joke, and laughed loudly, but only after a long, long, beat. It took them a relatively long time to make the connections Salt Lake -> Mormon -> Jesus is a Mormon -> poor old Pope -> Ha-ha! It was an interesting sort of “crossover” joke, I think. An inside joke basically — the kind Mormons tell each other sometimes — yet it worked quite well with a non-Mormon audience. Indeed, it was probably funnier for being unexpected.

I was interviewing a rather distinguished and august member of our ward. He has served several missions with his wife and has been a stake president and a bishop as well. I was telling him several jokes and asking him to rate them on a rather subjective scale of very funny-somewhat funny-not funny-offensive. The joke was as follows:

A bishopric is out camping. As they are winding down a busy day of hiking and fishing, the second counselor looks nervously around the campfire and pulls out a little coffee cup with a packet of instant coffee. “I’m sorry, brothers,” he begins, “but I have this one little vice. When I am out camping, I just have to have a cup of coffee.”

The first counselor looks questioningly at the bishop and reaches into his bag. “That’s okay brother. I have a little vice, too. When I am out camping, I have to smoke a good cigar.”

The bishop smiles nervously. “Then I guess we’re all in the same boat, brethren, because I have a little vice, too.” He reaches into his bag and pulls out a can of beer. The three of them look anxiously at the executive secretary, who is nervously twiddling his thumbs.

“Well brother, don’t you have any vices to confess?”

“I have one,” he says. “I am a terrible gossip, and I can’t wait to get back and tell everyone what you guys just said!”

As soon as I got to that punchline, the man I was interviewing laughed out loud — a huge smile across his face. As his flurry of chuckles died down to a friendly smile I asked, “So how would you rate this joke?”

“Oh, it’s not funny,” he said without any hesitation, the friendly smile still across his face. “I’ve been a bishop. People don’t recognize how difficult a calling that is. I would never make fun of a bishop. In fact,” his smile changed to a frown, “why don’t you change that to offensive. Yes, I find that joke offensive.”

Can you see the incongruities? First, you have the actions of the bishopric that are incongruous with our expectations of a bishopric. Second you have the “progression” of sins (coffee, cigar, beer — and whether or not drinking a beer is really more egregious than smoking a cigar, the structure of this joke would seem to suggest that at least some LDS people think so) followed by “gossip” which is incongruous with what is typically thought of as a “sin.” And third (because everything just naturally occurs in patterns of three), you have the incongruity of my interviewee who immediately laughed at the joke and then said it wasn’t funny. Studying the incongruities in humor is a good way to get a handle on the cultural expectations of a group of people.

In a similar vein I know a high-council member in another stake who used to drink beer before he joined the Church. Afterwards he would, on occasion, drink non-alchoholic beer. One time he went to a restaurant and ordered his favorite brand and remarked how good it was. Only after he polished it off did he notice it was the real thing. He went to his stake president and told him what had happened and the SP just laughed at him. He would quite regularly tell other people the story (even while subsequently serving as a bishop) and laugh at it. I suspect that Glenn’s informant, on the other hand, would not have gone around repeating this personal-experience narrative if it happened to him.

These different responses represent different personal attitudes and ways of coping with stressful environments. The fact that Glenn‘s informant would laugh at first and then conclude it was not funny shows that humor can work at various levels. I suspect that it was funny at one level for him (hence the initial laugh), but at another it was not, and in the end the one level won out over the other as the primary interpretation.

We are often ambivalent about humor. Quite frequently I will watch a movie and get to one of those “I can’t believe I’m laughing at something so stupid” moments in which I find something really funny, but also really stupid or even offensive. I often have a similar reaction to jokes that relate to sexual matters: they often are funny, but my Mormon, no-dirty-dokes, sex-is-not-to-be-discussed attitude also kicks in, so I experience both humor and offense simultaneously.

I think in this ex-bishop’s case, he felt — upon further analysis –that it should not be funny — in fact, it should be offensive — but that doesn’t discount the initial, immediate reaction of laughter. If it had been a “fake laugh” where he was just trying to be kind, that would be one thing. But he really laughed.